Second, with respect to the danger of stagnation and reversal of ongoing arms-reduction processes, the immediate exercise of forceful leadership by President Clinton and President Yeltsin is called for in order to bring about the ratification, by the U.S. Senate and the Russian Duma, of both the START 2 agreement and the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Indeed, Hollywood action movies were more accurate at depicting how power was wielded in Yeltsin’s Russia than the prestige press or the Harvard Economics Dept., which saw it as a high-minded ideological struggle between free-market “reformers” and ex-Communist “conservatives.”

I am interested in this stuff, Yeltsin is history, but there may come a time when I’d prefer more news about Alberto Gonzales, and I definitely want to hear anything they have on the Internet or Macintosh, or the impeachment of President Bush.

If the idea of Yeltsin as a diplomat hosting soirees at Kensington Palace Gardens seems far-fetched, Gorbachev's assessment of what went wrong 20 years ago – and what has gone wrong since – is more realistic.